March DWJ reading so far

By -
It may not seem like I've done much March Magics reading, but I have in fact -- in the spirit of reading the favorites -- read two and a bit DWJ novels.


I needed to read Homeward Bounders all of a sudden because one of the kids had a phone catastrophe and my husband pretty much said "As to that..." and produced a replacement phone out of thin air.  It was a pretty impressive trenchcoat effect moment.  I adore Homeward Bounders, it's such a strange story and so compelling and tragic, yet of course has DWJ's humor and tendency to drop deep thought grenades on the reader (as in, you don't see them for a while and then *boom* -- in fact, I hereby declare that to be a new technical term.  Deep Thought Grenades.). 

Homeward Bounders is what you get when you put multiverse theory, Greek mythology, and Dungeons & Dragons together in a blender, and add a street-smart Victorian urchin to the mix.


I also picked Hexwood from my DWJ shelf.  I love Hexwood for its bizarre complexity; I suppose she would have had to make extensive notes for the story structure, and I wonder if it would be possible to diagram it out somehow?  It's a daunting prospect.  I have to figure out some of it anew each time I read it, what with everybody having at least two identities, and those in deliberate contrast with each other.  Absolutely everything is juxtaposed with its opposite: a galactic empire with a medieval fantasy landscape, a super-intelligent computer with the ancient primeval forest, legendary heroes with futuristic tyrants....even Fire and Hemlock might not be quite this pretzel-like!


Speaking of which, Fire and Hemlock is what I'm reading now, though I'm not very far in yet.  And I need to start Howl's Moving Castle if I'm going to write a post for the right day!

Comments

  1. Kristen M.March 23, 2019 at 1:13 PM

    I haven't been writing up all of my DWJ and Pratchett reads either and I'm the host! The problem is that I had some major issues with Enchanted Glass when I reread it this time. I absolutely loved it before so it was distressing to have some of the problematic things stand out to me this time. Right now I'm reading Year of the Griffin (after a reread of Derk) and becoming contented again. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jenny @ Reading the EndMarch 24, 2019 at 4:28 PM

    Deep Thought Grenades is so so real, that's exactly what DWJ books do! And what's weird is that nothing about the writing changes, it's just that I get older and realize how fundamentally true and accurate the things she said in her books were. It's so lovely to age with these books because they keep seeming to grow with me, even though objectively I know I'm the only one doing the growing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. LoryMarch 24, 2019 at 6:41 PM

    I also love the term "Deep Thought Grenades." Homeward Bounders is a classic example. That ending...

    I've been hankering to reread Hexwood lately though I didn't get to it yet. My books are mostly in boxes at the moment so it's hard to lay my hands on the one I want.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more